Sometimes I'm trading on the platform and I see a trade I made going south... Like really south.

A few things go into my mind when I see this happening:

1. Is this a surprise? Did I feel like the level of risk I took on was miscalculated? Did I fuck up?

2. Should I eat the loss and close out?

3. How fucked am I if I do nothing and things keep going south?

In this case, I definitely fucked up. I took on way too much risk and kept closing out profit but never readjusting my exposure so after a month or so of doing this, I was heavily exposed to the trade I was doing going down. If it dropped by any significant amount for 2 back-to-back days, I was going to get destroyed and that is exactly what happened. It's not a matter of if it will happen, but more a question of when, and knowing this, I still went into denial and never fixed my risk profile which left me with a bomb ready to blow any second.

Doing number 2 always hurts a lot. It feels like I'm losing a part of myself, and conversely when I close out a winning trade, it feels like I grew, like I gained something out of it.

What does losing a part of myself feel like ? Sometimes it feels painless, like getting some hair cut off when it's a small loss, other times it is a little more painful like getting a nail pulled out when the loss is a little bigger.

But today, it was probably one of the most painful I've had to deal with all year, I felt like I had to cut off a part of my arm, like I had to grab a cleaver and hack off everything below the elbow in order to save myself from being killed.

It was a hard decision to make, and it ultimately ended up being the right decision because had I not, things would have spread even further and I wouldn't have a shoulder right now.

The thing about that is, I can only hope through patience and learning that I never have to do that again. I say this, but I will probably make the same mistake at some time in the future because I am human and humans make mistakes, sometimes I get greedy, sometimes I get fearful and sometimes those emotions lead me into decisions that tend to expose me to levels of risk which I would not take under normal circumstances with a calm mind.

In the future, I hope to have my arm back by growing it slowly by making sound decisions again... By being patient... I have learned my lesson for now.